African electric mobility company Spiro has closed an additional $55 million investment from NewTrails Capital, a Chinese growth stage fund.
The new commitment pushes Spiro’s latest funding round to $270 million, just days after the company announced the round’s first close. For an industry still proving itself to global capital, that timing matters. It tells investors Spiro did not need to chase this money. The money came looking for Spiro.
Gagan Gupta, the company’s founder, called the investment a signal rather than a transaction.
“This is more than capital,” he said. “It is momentum building between Asia and Africa: Chinese investment supporting African technology, manufacturing and EV infrastructure.”
Who NewTrails Capital Is, and Why It Matters
NewTrails Capital runs offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Nigeria. The fund backs growth stage companies across Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America, often aligning its bets with the Belt and Road Initiative’s trade corridors. Much of the hardware behind electric mobility, batteries, motors, charging components, still depends on Chinese supply chains. A Chinese investor with direct ties to those suppliers gives Spiro a faster route to sourcing parts and, eventually, building more of them locally.
Spiro’s Reach Across the Continent
Spiro now operates in seven African markets. The company has put more than 100,000 electric motorcycles on the road and built over 2,500 battery swap stations, where riders trade a depleted battery for a charged one in minutes rather than waiting hours to charge. Riders have completed more than 30 million swaps to date.
The next markets on Spiro’s list are Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rather than spreading itself thin to get there, the company says it will keep deepening manufacturing and infrastructure in the markets it already serves.
What the Investor Sees in Spiro
Yufan Zhang, founding partner at NewTrails Capital, framed the bet in structural terms. Spiro, he said, has stitched together vehicles, batteries, charging, payments and service networks into one system built around how African riders actually work and travel. “We believe Spiro is driving an energy revolution across mobility use cases in Africa,” Zhang said, describing the company’s potential to grow into an infrastructure business with commercial, social and environmental returns.
Zhang also pointed to a trend bigger than one deal: Chinese supply chains and financing are taking on a larger role in Africa’s shift toward green energy and transport. “Spiro is still a young company, and everything today is only the beginning,” he said. “We look forward to continuing to fulfil our role as a long term investor.”
A Crowded Field of Backers
NewTrails Capital joins a lineup of institutional and impact investors already behind Spiro, including FEDA, Impact Fund Denmark, Equitane, Nithio and the Africa Go Green Fund. Gupta, who also chairs Equitane, said the company has moved past testing its model and into scaling it. “Having deployed 100,000 electric vehicles and 2,500 smart swap stations across seven active markets, Spiro has firmly moved past the proof of concept phase,” he said.
Where the Money Goes Next
Spiro says the fresh capital will fund manufacturing and supply chain localisation, work it plans to carry out in close collaboration with Chinese suppliers. In practice, that means building more of its vehicles and components on African soil rather than importing them, a shift that could lower costs and shorten the company’s path to profitability as it scales.
Three funding rounds in a single year point to a company racing against time as much as it is racing toward growth. Spiro is betting that whoever builds Africa’s battery swapping infrastructure first, builds the road everyone else has to use. With NewTrails Capital’s money and its supply chain relationships now behind that bet, Spiro has more runway than most rivals to find out if it is right.
